Books™ Readings from Argos Books, Autonomedia, Fractious D.A

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ARGOS BOOKS 2 AUTONOMEDIA 3 FRACTIOUS PRESS 4 KAYA PRESS 5 LOUDMOUTH PRESS 6 BOOG CITY NEW YORK QUARTERLY 7 A COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FROM A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS BASED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY’S EAST VILLAGE ISSUE 66 FREE Celebrate Six of the City’s Best Small Presses Inside in Their Own Words and Live

Books™ Readings from Argos Books, Autonomedia, Fractious d.a. levy lives Press, Kaya Press, LoudMouth Press, and New York Quarterly authors (see below), and music from Matteah each month celebrating a renegade press Baim with Golden Slumbers. Plus cheese and crackers, and wine and other beverages. Curated by Cristiana Baik Tues. Dec. 14, 6:00 p.m., free and Svetlana Kitto New York City ACA Galleries 529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr. (10th/11th aves) For information call 212-842-BOOG (2664) • [email protected] Small Presses Night www.welcometoboogcity.com

Argos Books Fractious Press Kaya Press LoudMouth Press Marina Blitshteyn Steven J. Hann Samantha Chanse Geoff Cunningham Hildred Crill Nikkiesha N. McLeod Lisa Chen Carla Repice Bianca Stone Buzz Poole Ed Lin New York Quarterly K. Abigail Walthausen Thaddeus Rutkowski Autonomedia Tony Gloeggler Thera Webb Jordan Zinovich Douglas Treem It’s Like I cannot love like a ninepin. Not like the lane. Not like the blue shoe. I can love like a farmhouse, or a grief- chimney that funnels from the ovens of my earlier unpopular period. This Й elision/possession is a small pond where thousands of black tadpoles loiter at the rocks. maybe he’s This is a wooden raft being tipped equally as eclipsed by distance by an assembly of teenagers. as I’m even And there are no clouds in the sky. eagerly possessed Renovation Somewhere in the Building No airplanes. There isn’t even a sky. There isn’t even a sky. I wear the flexible fingers say a sound – Bianca Stone of a hardware guardian is diminished alert to repercussions maybe a beat quickens From the chapbook Someone Else’s Wedding of the upstairs hammer, towards the rest Vows. Available at the Argos Books website. the intransigent anvil, the interior drill. an elision slips Where I am easily at the end is part of where you are wearing a sleeveless wherever that is. mini as the heart There’s no ridding myself of the feel of screws, bolts, is already undressed. electric switches. maybe we seem I lick the sparks on my palm too pleasing or This Landscape of Girlish Iniquity (forest) and the entire world is spoken. too blessed – Hildred Crill Where I lived for many years. Boardinghouse of flocked to pass anymore tests nightgowns, sunless girls wrapping locks of hair around From the chapbook The Upstairs Hammer. Available at the so we freely rags. Took my first tipple there, a ritual that came to Argos Books website. marry our ribs replace vesperal ablutions, replace the bedside lowering, in our chests & we’re soften the mind to near love. Learned the difference between clown and mime was not silence, but skill. Ran really too ready my hands along a wall of my invention, was often climbing but possession comes last imagined stairs, spent hours picking invisible orchids. in Russian, a vowel Sometimes I was a man coming on to me. Shy in repose, I stays longer in the west rebuffed the evening shadow as a boreal conifer feathering – Marina Blitshteyn out, cast my fingers across the door draft to pluck a most dolorous credo. No one listened, even those who looked. From the chapbook Russian For Lovers. Once, in recalcitrant vignette, I posed for years as a girl Available February 2011. who didn’t know a goddamn thing, my homeland was a single shaft of light across floorboards, the dust shone as snow in a Pasternak diorama. This is what I remember every night as I emigrate to your border. You are sitting at the computer, maybe paying bills. Your dark limbs laden with my favorite birds. Their happy song I am always making my way toward. – Paige Ackerson-Kiely Mermaid

From the first installment in the Side By Side Series: collaborations be- Caribbean thyme is ten times stronger than the English variety tween poets and artists, This Landscape is a collaboration between poet — just ask Miss Queenie and her royal navy, who couldn’t Paige Ackerson-Kiely and artist Adie Russell. Available at the Argos Books yank a Jamaican weed from her rose-garden that didn’t grow web site. back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated man. The tepid American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh, why I furrowed rough at the brow, why I knew the hollow points of every bone. But dig where the soil is wet and plant the proud seed of your shame-tree; don’t let them Unexpected say it never grew. Roll the saltfish barrel down the hill, sending that battered thunder clanging at the seaside moon, jangled Sometimes it is wonderful when a friend shows up unexpectedly at by her long earrings at our sea, ten times bluer than the bluest daybreak. I drank a first coffee and opened the kitchen window, and the eye. That mint tea whistling in the Dutch pot is stronger than cold air breezed in and held its soft hat and scarf out to me. liquor, and takes six spoons of sugar, please—what can I say, Out in the world, across the street, the black dog of sadness sniffs along my great-grandfather’s blood was clotted thick with sugar the red garden wall and snuffles up the snowy hillside, seeking its master. cane and overproof rum; when he bled it trickled heavy like – S.C. Hahn molasses, clotted black like phlegm in the throat. Every red ant from Negril to Frenchman’s Cove came to burrow and From the collection of prose poems A Sky That Is Never the Same. Available at the Argos suckle at his vein, where his leg was honeyed with a diabetic Books website. rot, and when he caught my grandmother in his wide fishing net, he served her up cold to his wild-eyed son: “Mermaid on the deck.” Now I too am rooted deep in his mutinous garden, buried in the dirt with the rioting mimosas, which open and close with the blue pulse of my breath, spiring tenfold through this dreaming skeleton. – Safiya Sinclair

From the forthcoming collection of poetry and essays Catacombs. Available June 2011.

Argos Books is an independent literary press, founded in 2010 by three poet-translators. Our aim is to support poetry, hybrid genres, translation, and collaboration, with a special interest in work that crosses cultural and national borders. We have two curated series intended to engage with diverse work in unexpected ways: the Little Anthology series, small anthologies that capture a community, subject or point of view, and Side by Side, collaborations between artists and writers. While publishing innovative work is our primary focus, we are also invested in facilitating critical dialogues among communities, genders, and languages.

For more information and to buy upcoming and available titles please visit our website: www.argosbooks.org

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WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM BOOG CITY 7 URBAN FOLK A Magna Opera Laughter & Lust Meets Frampton Comes Alive! Meets Ride This (or Trio) Meets Taking Liberties BY JONATHAN which were thematically consistent studio, like Remer and Nan Turner’s the work in perspective. have extra-band collaborators, the works. While sometimes the themes take on Joe Jackson’s “Different for Often there are associations traditional numbers usually include B E R G E R are pretty vague (Costello’s Punch Girls,” which successfully captures between tracks, certain suites of songs AntiFolk expatriate Debe Dalton. The Fustercluck!!! the Clock can be identified as “the all the chaotic energy of a drunken that link together Elastic No-No Band pop album”), each of the albums night out for karaoke. Much better quite well, that With Elastic No-No Band’s ustin Remer does not hide his these English New Wave singer- is the reinterpretation of the Everly are followed by influences well, or, really, even songwriters released during their Brothers’ “Poor Jenny,” wonderfully the innards of dual-disc, 45-track magna opera, Jtry to. He seems proud to give most prolific periods has a distinct assisted by Toby Goodshank (who another, entirely Fustercluck!!!, Remer has upped credit where it’s due. The title of identity all its own. Like his revered also collaborated on the cover different concept his 2008 EP, Every Elvis Has His predecessors, Remer likes to make with Elastic No-No Band-member album. “Color the ante. He has made not just one Impersonators, makes an indirect thematic albums. His last full-length Preston Spurlock). Machine” and concept album but a series of them. reference to Elvis Costello’s 2002 as Elastic No-No Band was My There are live tracks throughout the “Mouth” are track “Episode of Blonde.” That’s a 3 Addictions, which described, in album—including the hilarious story- experimental tracks (so part of the B-sides album), most Dalton-related track is the duet the first with Brook Pridemore and of “There’s A Hole in The Bucket,” the second with the sampled help of which includes her in the role of Dear the artist formerly known as Declan Liza. She sings her lines with perfect, MacManus. Then the album left- thinly veiled contempt for her partner, fields into “Hangover Dial,” a slightly Dear Henry, who acts innocent while sweet song about postponing the leading her irrevocably into the call to the night after the bender. intellectual impasse that closes the Sometimes the links between song. It’s truly a thing of beauty. songs are clear but still Other incredible voices can be cacophonous. Right after a solo heard throughout the album. Sure, duets incarnation of Elastic No-No Band make up the collaboration album, but rips through an excellent version of there are also a number of outstanding “Goodbye Southern Death Swing,” call-and-response sequences featuring logical choice, since the EP is a mini- separate sections, his vices of girls, about-songs “The Worst Thing on originally by Major Matt Mason anonymous voices. “Hot As I Are” album of Costello covers. Even the movies, and food. My Resume,” which details Remer’s USA (with Remer, co-producer of includes excellent uncredited shouting. name of Remer’s group, Elastic No- Now, with Elastic No-No Band’s repeated attempt to get included in the album), there is a strange epic. While bassist Spurlock and drummer No Band, alludes to John Lennon’s dual-disc, 45-track magna opera, the soundtrack of a Troma film. That, “The End of Disc 1 As We Know It” Doug Johnson are credited as backing first post-Beatles undertaking. Fustercluck!!!, Remer has upped the and with the band tracks “Imaginary prominently features a Major Matt vocalists, there seems to be a fair Remer is certainly a big fan of the ante. He has made not just one concept Girlfriend,” “Red” (one of the versions voiceover and an infectious Muzak amount of Remer helping himself out with singer-songwriters, clearly bowing album but a series of them, joined in included on the album), and “Turn track that seems eerily familiar. Also backup vocals. Many of the tracks are before masters like Costello and Joe one appropriately named whole. Out Right Rock,” which has made an part of the B-Sides Album are five demonstrably improved by executing Jackson, who, in fact, is covered on Included in the 140-minute appearance on the last two Elastic remakes on the album(s)—seven if the magic of multitracked Remer. Remer’s latest. From 1980 through extravaganza are a live album, a No-No Band full-lengths, compose you count “Red,” which exists as Probably the best thing about 1987, Jackson made albums that use collaborations album, a covers album, part of the live album. Numerous a live track on disc two and a Fustercluck!!! is the sheer chutzpah of its lyrical themes and musical styles as and a B-sides album. Sometimes tracks give the impression of loose, collaboration with Chris Andersen magnificent sprawl. It’s a massive thing the cartilage linking disparate songs. these albums overlap. ramshackle, live recordings, and the (of The Christian Pirate Puppets) on to consume all at once, but there are Elvis Costello, meanwhile, produced Early on disc one is a triptych comprehensive notes at the interactive disc one. so many ways to take it in. Certainly, it’s a 10-year run of high-concept of cover songs, all featuring duets website support this assessment. In The cover album hidden more than worth the attempt. albums, from This Year’s Model with prominent AntiFolk artists. Some fact, Remer’s own commentary on his in Fustercluck!!! can be further Jonathan Berger is Boog City’s through Blood and Chocolate, of them were recorded live in the humongous album helps put much of subdivided. While most of the covers Urban Folk editor.

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8 BOOGBOOG CITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM PRINTED MATTER Ives Crosses This Out Seeing Stanley’s Forest for the Trees BY CHRIS MARTIN Cross this out BY KARL SAFFRAN Stanley’s writing as a humanizing of nature Anamnesis Write, “But I stay like this, I change and I Book Made of Forest runs in direct opposition to Jeffers’ efforts Lucy Ives don’t, embarrassed Jared Stanley to “unhumanize” ourselves. If there’s an Slope Editions of my own presence” Salt Publishing intersection, however, it’s in Book Made of rite, “at first glance Anamnesis ared Stanley’s reading here in Milwaukee Forest’s “State Park.” might seem like a failed paean “Only a memory of feeling” seems in the fall of last year was, in the most Twice referencing “public private to the Platonic Ideal.” Cross that like an operative line in this book. Recent pleasant way possible, something like a disappearance,” Stanley mocks the act W neurological studies have revealed just how J of visiting protected land reserved for the out. Write, “Anamnesis has been used by sucker-poetry-punch to the gut. It was one much memory is invented and perpetually of the rare cases of seeing a reading by masses. distorted through its reinvention. As Ives’ lines someone whose work you’re not familiar reinvent themselves, they posit these feelings with and being sincerely wowed—by the Oh my people anew, retaining only the flashbulb’s overlap as poems and the performance. I’d hesitate to you fennel, rocks and vandalism, it drains from image to image. But since this is call Stanley’s delivery a style, as his writhing you fees, you gates, you group of kids, a book and not a brain, the lines themselves movement appears to be the poems escaping you candles in the Sibley maze. must remain as they are, even in the midst from his body in a purely natural way. His of being crossed out or amended. So, “I physical reading, at the time, seemed entirely Instead of living with nature change and I don’t,” and this “I” finds itself of the poetry—only later was I aware of it in a in the stereotypical sense of locked into the perseveration at the core of larger sense. presence that makes it feel so “embarrassed.” His book, published last year by Salt, gives peace and harmony, Stanley What recuperates this perseverating self of a similar effect, starting, even, with the title. Anamnesis is the aforementioned perseverance Book Made of Forest, for me at least, almost here treats nature like an Ives demonstrates, her perpetual redo that wants to be read as Book Made of Trees when affable but messy roommate, moves from erasure to compulsion to witness. in fact it’s much less ordinary, much bigger. It is, finally, the witnessing that seems most The forest, of course, is vastly more complex leading to an affectionate yet important here. Once one falls into the rhythmic than a group of trees. Stanley takes aim at this strained domesticity. emendations of the text, the gentle thrill of lived complexity in his first poem, “What is Outside.” life emerges in all its fractured glory. Though After utilizing lines from Robinson Jeffers’ poem anamnesis is a term forever tied to Plato, the “The Birds,” Stanley finds that force of Ives’ writing appears directed against Far removed from Jeffers’ hope for Lucy Ives the ideal. It’s not that she’s searching for the Daws, hungrier than I am “uncenter[ed]” appreciators of nature, Stanley’s perfect line or some egress to the transcendent or parkgoers are preoccupied with “[t]he money audiographers to describe ‘The Madeleine access to the soul’s own memory; she is bearing screech for interiority. situation/ no children to love/ all the people Effect’ of certain timbres to trigger memory.” witness to the present moment, whether lived Anechoic choice who could know.” The poem closes with some Cross that out. Write, “that Anamnesis is about or remembered, and how its disappearing act of my favorite lines from the book: memory makes it inextricable from the dangers keeps purity at bay. Anamnesis succeeds most to die of exposure of nostalgia.” Strike through “nostalgia,” write when it feels least ideal, shoring its succession of or expostulation. You stack of wood, soon to be pencils “prose.” Cross all that out. Write, “the triumph now against our desire to memorialize it: you pencils at the end of nature of Anamnesis is not found in the process of The first section of the book is filled with you number of unsolved indentations erasure, but in the perseverance of starting Anamnesis is, indeed, a moments like these: man is brought to nature you. on the ground. over.” Now add “the first book by Lucy Ives book about memory, but and likewise, nature to man. and winner of the 2008 Slope Editions Book Book Made of Forest closes with “Admirations: Prize” before “is.” only insofar as memory is A mockingbird perched Covers, Portraits, and Articulations,” a section This is the experience of reading Anamnesis, an active recreation of the on a plastic owl’s head composed mostly of prose poems dedicated to various poets, musicians, artists, and others. which is exasperating and exhilarating in turns. remembered. And it is about over the top of the screen As the OED gloss found on the book’s last page through the window The sentiment here, for the most part, remains notes, anamnesis is “the recalling of things past; the ideal, but only insofar as the same. From “For Michael O’Brien”: “the recollection, reminiscence.” There seems to be it wages a refutation against and “A rake is imitating a typewriter/ scratching mulberry … it would be a city mulberry, a a connection to Plato as well, whose doctrine the word yes/ in the dirt between the trees.” The beautiful shape made more beautiful by carrying of anamnesis involved the imperfect mortal it. What is important here poems have a relationship with nature that is its requisite number of flying plastic bags. English remembering of those ideas once known by the is how the moment makes refreshingly human. Instead of living with nature needs fewer words.” The standout poem from this section, though, is “For Brenda Coultas,” soul in its ideal constitution. It is, indeed, a book its unpredictable swerve, in the stereotypical sense of peace and harmony, about memory, but only insofar as memory is Stanley here treats nature like an affable but which just might have the greatest Civil War an active recreation of the remembered. And it clamoring just ahead of time, messy roommate, leading to an affectionate yet battlefield/celebrated actor metaphor ever written. is about the ideal, but only insofar as it wages who is busy sweeping up strained domesticity. There are moments such a refutation against it. What is important here as “An eye is a whisper of a shadow; I think of is how the moment makes its unpredictable what just happened, even if it trees;/ embarrassing trees that care.” and Chantilly’s a beautiful name for a nonexistent swerve, clamoring just ahead of time, which is happened a long time ago. place under an innocent parking lot that busy sweeping up what just happened, even Moon, never killed nobody. I go there inhabited by if it happened a long time ago. This constant you can’t win. you, and though you may or may not exist, scurry destabilizes Anamnesis, but Ives dutifully Write, “Girls react to others on the street” You’re wallpaper, this mark is there for all to see for now, the clothes the moment’s vulnerability with lines that Cross out “Girls” a head on the ramparts, or a compass of colonial style colonizing the fairly national bring out whatever “sure” she can find in the Write, “I” hinges site of bloody death and bullet-pocked trees. close of “measure.” In this way, she mirrors the And draw the pigeon with one leg white as in a city’s sky. What kind of land deserves a death-mask as inexorable choosing we all do as the de facto milk and the much as John C. Reilly, in life a friendly ghost authorities of our lives: orange basketball The effect is strange, wonderful, and but with pangs of history written in a dark Sliding across the rim somehow more real then the awed deference script around the eyes, jowls, brows? Write, “It became bright morning in the Write, “A man shows me one of his often contained in poetry concerned with middle of the night” thumbs” nature. These moments of human interaction It is moments like these that demonstrate Write, “On television I saw a beach” Write, “I am passing him” (as opposed to human interactions) once Jared Stanley’s descriptive powers and his Write, “I stepped outdoors” Cross this out again recall Robinson Jeffers and, here, his ability to tease out elaborate beauty from Write, “Someone was smoking” Write, “All this is only writing” notion of Inhumanism—to which the strongest even the bleakest of landscapes and, likewise, Cross all this out Cross this out call is found in his poem “Carmel Point”: “We undeniably human complexity from otherwise Write, “I needed a lot of things” must uncenter our minds from ourselves;/ standard scenery. Cross this out Chris Martin is the author of American We must unhumanize our views a little, and Karl Saffran lives in Milwaukee, where he Write, “When one has come to have only Music (Copper Canyon). The web journal become confident/ As the rock and ocean co-curates the Salacious Banter reading series. a memory he edited, puppyflowers (www.puppyflowers. that we were made from.” In many ways, For more information visit www.salaciousbanter. of feeling” com), just finished its 11-issue run. and certainly on the surface, my reading of blogspot.com.

WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM OCTOBER 2003BOOG BOOG CITY CITY 9 PRINTED MATTER There Is a Message on the Monument Selected Edward Sanders BY DOUGLAS Marilyn’s tiki-wiki skirt. He makes up words wages and fame, travel to tombstones, and “crime-brain scanner,” all in order for her to and spins asymmetrical webs. He can even collecting verses from famous poets for a new sit in a waiting room for four hours, where MANSON abbreviate atrocity until you feel your briefs “Amazing Grace.” Of course, there is always she was finally acknowledged by a tired, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: creep up your crack into a squishy bunch. discussion of the prominent causes about which overworked employee who yelled at her for Selected Poems 1961-1985. New and Sometimes the poem feels like the hairball in consciousness needs to be raised—the peace not having all the papers she needed. Treated Revised Edition. your hotdog, and sometimes the poem cools movement, campaigns for social justice—and like a suspect just because she wanted to get its heels in the nymph-pools of En Gedi. In of simple human kindness to those in need. Let’s Not Keep Fighting The Trojan War: Sanders’ verse, all metaphors are welcomed. Reading the book from cover to cover takes the Sanders stretches a shining New and Selected Poems 1986-2009 These poems enact a gentle rage. The breath away in its range of distinct topics and Edward Sanders bare-handed rock-climber of time’s crumbling personages. As a whole Let’s Not Keep Fighting cord of memory across time—a Coffee House Press pile of fragments climbs onto the stage and The Trojan War resembles the “lists” Sanders cord embodied in the driving, dward Sanders is famous. The poems sings boogie woogie. These poems say: Have praises and bemoans near the volume’s end: in this book thirst, pacify, rage, and courage! See for yourself! “This is the age of incessant beats of pop songs; Ehistoricize. There is a hieroglyphic investigation”! Is poetry like this readily available Not even a billion parallel universes the density of his famous “data emblem on the very first page that should be to us anymore? Are there poets like this here or … well attended to. Is it a magical talisman to anywhere? For now he is here. Anymore is now. would be enough clusters”; and in matter-of-fact, ward off evil spirits? Is it the name of the book But Sanders is not a self-important man; he has to list what needs to be done. plain-spoken meters. reproduced in ancient Egyptian? Careful study of this text may allow its decipherment. Even as much of the work is dedicated to something to eat, my friend found herself inside American poets should read this book. the intertwined strands of history and poetry, “the same cruel system” that Sanders claims Americans who can’t stand even the smell with Sanders’ memory and investigations in the trickled out from beneath a glacier 15,000 of a poem should read this book. Rock ’n’ foreground—disclosed in clear and strident tones— years ago. Is this also “we the people”? rollers, if any still exist, should read this book. Miriam Sanders photo the book is also a tribute to the great poets and Sanders is adept at revealing such absurdities. It is a book for careful study, yes, but also personal friends who meant the most to him. There I especially enjoyed his capsule biographies, the a book for joyously singing aloud. Edward are odes, nostalgic laments, diary poems, and results of a practice that may have begun with Sanders is a crowd, a multitude harnessing elegies as well. In their need to rouse, affirm, or his book The Family, about the Manson murder a weirdly wavering articulate revelation that repudiate, the poems have no qualms if they are cult (no relation), continuing through his Hymn echoes through the stone canyons of the city sometimes homiletic. Sanders can be populist in to the Rebel Cafe and into his big volumes of and frightens woodland creatures into reluctant the way that Carl Sandberg was populist and 20th century history. I laughed at how Friedrich evolutionary dances. Everything is permissible, sometimes as Archibald MacLeish was. He writes Hölderlin had to go out “looking for tutoring jobs personified, and perforated; that is, until it is in homage to his peers as heroes and to his in poetless towns,” as I was reminded of all the realized that there are only two constants in indeed taken the humble oath of the truth-teller political heroes, the Kennedys, as tragic actors. poets I have known who were forced to travel Sandersian n-space: time and the voice. for the benefit of his people. He writes hymns, fight songs, and cheers. across the continent and beyond, looking for Thirsting for Peace achieves the wonderful These poems exist as historical proof. There One poetic innovation that Sanders often work in the name of poetic art. incompletion that is thirst: the desire to be is a witness who will take the stand. Nobody uses is the compound word—called a kenning Sanders’ tone ranges from encouraging and quenched and that dull ebullition cooking the else is telling this story in this way, so at least in Anglo-Saxon poetry—such as “vom-vom,” informative to admonishing and disquieting, but taters behind all static forms. “Form” here means listen, even if you can’t imitate. The poems in “poor-kill,” “fang-packs,” and “time tracks.” overall it is comforting. Sadly, in this second half poetics, artifice, and prosody. Sanders has done this book embody the desire to investigate and While his kennings, use of shorthand, and of a two-volume selection of a 50-year career, and written a million things. Almost by making it research. They should inspire readers to seek out abbreviations are often funny, they can now we are often given too-quick glimpses into the look like an accident—that special achievement more information about the people and events and then feel forced. broad and diverse spectrum of his tens of works of American art—he has created his own brand of described. Learn your history, teach your children Sanders can so terrify me with his descriptions and thousands of pages. Luckily, the fuller swathe historiography, poetry, and the public persona. His well, and serve your fellow creatures with good of horrors that I stop reading. He has seen of these details can be found elsewhere—either in lines are like little word globules, little molecules, deeds. There is a message on the memorial. much, traveled far, and known deep sorrow. his books, musical recordings with The Fugs and little hallucinatory street machines. Yet they are • He understands the results of his efforts and others, or in the various outside accounts of the often so prosaically conversational that it is easy A companion volume to Thirsting for Peace, why he must continue them. He reminds readers many events in which he took part. His very varied to forget they are poetry. The beauty of Sanders’ a new book of selected poems, Let’s Not Keep why the best journalists and journalist-poets life in verse traces a very varied course across poetry is also its greatest liability: all Americans Fighting The Trojan War, bears witness to the should be revered as heroes. I am cheered by time and space, so that reading these two books born in the raging 20th century may recognize Peace Eye bard’s continuing investment in the his encouragements and appreciate his advice has an epic feel. The best poem for me was the topics discussed in these poems but will not writing of history. He stretches a shining cord about poverty. In a poem about Herman his description of a psilocybin trip with Charles all feel the same about them in the end. There is of memory across time—a cord embodied in Melville’s father, he writes: Olson, recalled in all its Day-Glo, goofy pomp. the dimension of the universe you live and have the driving, incessant beats of pop songs; the While much of this book scatters details about like lived in, and there is the dimension of the universe density of his famous “data clusters”; and in Advice to the middle aged a runaway nomadic foray into the wilderness, it in which these poems are the most accurate matter-of-fact, plain-spoken meters. with penury’s prize still enables me to have vivid visions and a feeling description of what exists, what has happened. Opening with a “new” poem by the greatest … of green. It ever points and tacks its craft to a With Sanders, new information comes to light. lyric poet of Greek antiquity, Sappho, Sanders Be prepared to be sneered at magnificent and unnamable source. This book enters into the charged and proves how ancient and far-reaching his poetics like a hungry rat Douglas Manson is a poet and educator, necessary negotiations that warring parties is. While his mammoth, multi-volume America: publishes little scratch pad editions, Celery must conduct in order to establish peace A History in Verse divulges oceanic tides of This is so true! I recently accompanied Flute: The Kenneth Patchen Newsletter, and accords. Sanders includes more and more, information, the pieces here are much more a friend to a local food stamp center, maintains a blog currently listed as “Island can accommodate more and more, heroizes discrete, fleeting, personal, and anecdotal. They where she was digitally fingerprinted and of the Nondisenchanted.” He writes poems, and vilifies the irreconcilable until the poem include memories of Robert Creeley, Charles photographed. Her newly snatched bio-info published Roofing and Siding in 2007, and is so tactically impactful it’s ready to blow up Olson, and Allen Ginsberg; 9/11, poets’ was then run through the government’s big now lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

BOOG CITY poetry editor counsel Boog always reads work for Boog Joanna Fuhrman Ian S. Wilder City or other consideration. (Send SASE Issue 66 free [email protected] with up to five poems or pages of any type of art or writing. For email subs, editor/publisher printed matter editor put Boog City sub in subject line and David A. Kirschenbaum Arlo Quint • then email to [email protected] or [email protected] [email protected] applicable editor.) copy chief small press editor First printing, December 2010, 2,250 BOOG CITY Lauren Russell Douglas Manson copies. Send a $3 ppd. check or money [email protected] [email protected] 330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H order payable to David A. Kirschenbaum N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754 art editor urban folk editor to the address below for additional copies. Cora Lambert Jonathan Berger Paper is copyright Boog City. All rights revert www.welcometoboogcity.com [email protected] [email protected] to contributors upon publication. T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)

10 BOOGBOOG CITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM Andy Gricevich POETRY Madison, Wis. From For the Record Through the Window (tinted winter) Peter Waldor The stock of unfortunate size is sinking in the bleat of tax-sensitive born-agains Short Hills, N.J. milling and polling to stuff the season Notes to a Painter for a Series of with electrostatic perms achieved at last and risk, a breast pervades the attention Paintings on the Millipede’s Legs and might as well, since the room is bright and its center colossus-free. Get up to the waft of backup in the basement, repeat 14. melt-freeze as phrase screen made out with it the corner of snow would fall Fold the paper through tilted fields of broken home into a square and place it in your pocket. Walk and find a solitary flat space runoff and unfold the paper, weight the corners and wait two days, to walk thought down a crease no matter the weather. unplayed leaving its Then, in ink, remainder the legs as tall grass unwritten bent by wind. Let it stay two you think more days historically of no matter the weather, self-neglect in time refold, same pocket. as unshelter in the vast shortages Walk home.

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High up, a rusted ore car, too high for Indwelling jargon parades a petite bourgeoisie against clockwork, re news a softer emergence etched to strap on his mule vs. mist and haul down for his lawn, Music which, therefore, makes the world louder by contrast has no ornaments. In the loam Cars distinguish a millipede labors, one another legs arched-- Unmetaphorical a roller coaster. germination takes precedence

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Bleached ribs of a whale on an uncharted isle. Paint faithfully, though you will BELLADONNA* COLLABORATIVE never leave the island. 2011: A YEAR IN THE COMMONS

THE WIDE ROAD About the Poets Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian Andy Gricevich edits Cannot Exist magazine and, with Lewis Freedman, facilitates Long awaited by many since the early 1990’s, The Wide Road is a master the ______-Shaped Reading Series. He spent much of the last decade collaboration between two of our most necessary language innovators. performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins and strange political theater Self-described as a “picaresque buddy being,” The Wide Road explores and chamber music with the Nonsense Company. He fears we may be confusing the simultaneity of thinking and communicating in present time. irony with habitual insincerity and is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. Peter As such it is a mobile text, at once a constant and shifting travelogue, a celebration of the female body, an investigation into the inter- Waldor is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James Books), which was a finalist sections of female friendship, mothering, writing, community-making, for the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. The poems appearing here are part of a activism and thought. �� manuscript called “Leg Paint,” which is a set of instructions to a painter on how to paint Read more online at www.belladonnaseries.org/thewideroad.html ISBN: 978-0-9823387-4-2 a series of pictures depicting the millipede’s legs. READING & RELEASE PARTY: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 7:30 pm; $6 Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie St; New York Submission Guidelines Email subs to [email protected], with no more than five poems, all in one attached file with “My Name Submission” in the Pre-ordering available at www.BelladonnaSeries.org subject line and as the name of the file, ie: Walt Whitman Submission. Or mail with an Belladonna* promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, SASE to Poetry editor, Boog City, 330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H, N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754. multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to deﬁne, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language.

WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM OCTOBER 2003BOOG BOOG CITY CITY 11 New from LITMUS PRESS

HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD BY LESLIE SCALAPINO New & Expanded Edition In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essay- talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what diﬀerence does one’s living make?” What more crucial question for those concerned not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager. For Scalapino the essay is a poetic act; the poetic act, essay. It’s in that combination that her textual eros—the lush beauty of it!—could reject aesthetic purity and risk the rawness of genuinely new thought, touching what she called “the rim of occurring.” “Writing on rim” is a celebration of the wondrous present, but requires agonistic struggle with the ugly—poverty, war, institutional brutality, racism, sexism, homophobia. Scalapino’s Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one’s times, “altering oneself and altering negative social formation,” is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future. With compassion and humor, Scalapino was indeed living on the rim of occurrence. That is the living in the writing that produced this work—its fundamental optimism and ebullient credo: “The future creates the past.”  JOAN RETALLACK ��

�� BY�� In Beauport, Kate Colby tells the tale of the decorator and designer Henry Davis Sleeper, braiding in prose- lyric reminisces of her own New England upbringing and ‘anti-ekphrastic’ poems after Currier & Ives lithographs of the Victorian-era leisure class. This is Colby’s ‘sotted nineteenth century,’ peopled with antique glass buoys and ‘animate dioramas,’ where the sound of seagulls dropping quahogs on the roof echoes all day. Not since Charles Olson’s Maximus has Gloucester been so gallantly and aptly sung! � ��

Visit us online at www.litmuspress.org Distributed by Small Press Distribution at www.spdbooks.org

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12 BOOG CITY OCTOBER 2003